Just a bit of what I hope is useful info for Mac users - I have started using MagicPrefs from magicprefs.com with my Magic Mouse because 1)it doesn't seem to break anything and 2) it easily allows you to set a three finger click to the middle button. Brilliant.

I don't have any connection with the company, I just found it a way to get rid of the three button mouse I had plugged in as well (which moved at a different speed - eek!).

I use BetterTouchTool for the same purpose.
Anyone have an opinion on which is better? BTT looks more tweak-able to me, but all the options can be daunting, especially when combined with the user preferences > input editor in Blender.

Yup, that does look better than MagicPrefs. Since my system works well I'm loath to change, but the ability to set mod keys on gestures would be really useful. What I would really like is to have a three finger drag to spin a model and a two finger drag to move it. I have the first, (three fingers=middle button) but can't set two fingers to shift+MMB. That would be cool.

Well, I started messing around with these things because I wanted to be able to zoom by pinching, the way you do with pictures on the iPad, for instance. What I've come up with so far is not quite good enough, mapping the gesture in BTT to NumPad + and - . The effect is not very smooth, nothing like when you use the (emulated) scroll wheel.
I use the three-finger click and drag to rotate, like you do, and think that is quite okay, but would ideally want to be able to zoom by pinching and panning by just dragging the finger along trackpad, both horizontally and vertically. To pan with the scroll wheel + shift for up/down and ctrl for left/right is not very elegant in my opinion.

Single finger scrolling and panning - If I recall correctly that was how TrueSpace worked on the PC (what I used before Blender on a Mac) if an object wasn't selected. It's a bit hazy but I think I used to accidentally zip around all over my scene because I hadn't properly selected anything. Very fast if you got the expected result, but...

Looks like you want to program the trackpad differently from the mouse, that's a neat idea, although it will increase arm movement which would slow things down. Having said that I'm using an MBP so the trackpad is never far away from my keyboard hand.

I think I might download BTT, it does look better - I'm just really nervous of the idea of breaking what I currently have.

You might want to look at the Griffin PowerMate if it's still made. It was (is) a USB shuttle wheel and I use mine a lot but not yet for Blender - I might try that tomorrow. L/R for spin, press+L/R for pan. Hmm... what about U/D? Need to think about this a bit more! Shift perhaps? Not elegant, no.

Um, no, you got me wrong actually, when I said trackpad I meant the back of the magical mystery mouse. I hadn't even thought of the possibility of using the laptop trackpad seperatly since mine isn't multi-touch.
But yes, that is a neat idea. Trackpad-ninja takes of his socks and has two units sitting under his desk as well... anyway.
I guess you should definitely go easy on changing your working setup since those things I've been tinkering with so far don't really work yet, except for the functionality you already have in MagicPrefs anyway!
I have the luxury of beeing an amateur with no real projects going on so I can throw out the entire package and reinstall if things really go bad...
But the real headache for me now is to figure out how the keymap editor in the Blender user prefs works. Not exactly intuitive. Inelegant, I dare say.
Thanks for your input.

By the way, here is something that scores high in the elegance stakes: an entire ipad as a control surface! How these people navigate in the first 15 sec's of the promo vid is really what I am (unsuccessfully) trying to get with the magic mouse...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/12/maide- ... ontroller/

That looks really nice. I used - very briefly - a product called KeyPad Pro. It is now KeyPad Plus and it does a much simplified version of the Maide product. There is a Blender 2.5 overlay and the whole thing is quite cheap on the AppStore. However, I returned mine for a refund because I downloaded the Aperture plugin which pretty well immediately went wild and deleted all my photos. Hooray for TimeCapsule.

Remapping the Blender keystrokes - now that is an idea. I could remap them to something MagicPrefs can generate.